It was a sunny day after Deepavali when 30-year-old Suman was working at her little farm barely 50 metres away from her one-room house. A neighbour rushed to her around noon, informing that her children had fallen sick and taken to a nearby hospital.
A soon as she reached the hospital, she was informed that her daughters, aged 10 and seven, were brought dead while chances of her one-year-old son’s survival were bleak. The toddler died too.
“I lost everything in that moment. I can’t forget or forgive (my husband),” says Suman, a resident of Kabulpur village in Haryana’s Rohtak.
The police told her that her carpenter husband Sunil Kumar gave the children celphos, a pesticide, to consume.
Only her eight-year-old daughter, who refused to consume the pesticide and ran away from there, survived.
The police said Kumar claimed during questioning that he took the step as he was unable to repay his debt and was not in a position to bear expenses of the children. He had taken a total of around ₹10 lakh from various people.
Suman says she had started working as a farm labour, barely earning ₹3,000 to ₹4,000 a month, as her husband wasn’t earning enough to make both ends meet.
She says her husband never told her about the debt.
“It took us everything to build a small house from scratch, and it took my husband less than ₹100 to kill my three children, only because he couldn’t repay a loan of ₹10 lakh,” says Suman sitting in her one-bedroom house, which lacked a door.
Remembering the fateful day, Suman says she had left her cell phone home.
As soon as she got the news about the children’s sickness, she rushed home, only to fund that they were taken to a hospital.
“At the entrance of the house, I saw patches of vomit. I did not know what to do. I asked people but nobody had an idea,” says Suman.
It took her some time to figure out the situation.
“Only my second daughter fought him (her husband) and she’s alive today. She told me that their father gave them some black powder to consume, saying that it is a medicine. While she ran away after slapping my husband, the other children consumed it. He mixed the powder with water and gave the toddler through a feeding bottle,” says Suman.
After Kumar poisoned the children, he gave each of them a rasgulla to eatand then made them drink water. Kumar ran away on his bike when he found people screaming, says Suman.
Kumar was arrested a few days later from Jaipur after the incident on November 14.
“So far, he has no remorse. He seems unable to understand the gravity of the crime he has committed,” said area SHO Pradeep Kumar.
Kumar has been arrested under IPC Sections 302 (murder), 307 (attempt to murder) and 328 (causing hurt by means of poison) of the IPC, the SHO said.
